Asking Quentin Tarantino to be frank about his creative and production processes can overwhelm you with an uncontrollable eruption: it happened quite regularly to Jay Glennie, author of the book “The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds“, a behind-the-scenes look at Bastardi senza gloria. Tarantino laid out his view of the delicate casting process of his films, during which he is inflexible, to use a soft euphemism, so much that he won’t look anyone in the face. They paid the price in two different ways: Mélanie Laurent and Isabelle Huppert, but the former fared better than the latter.
Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino Almost Fired Mélanie Laurent and Definitely Fired Isabelle Huppert
The role of Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds, the cinema owner central to the film’s climax, had been assigned from the outset by Quentin Tarantino to Mélanie Laurent, but the director had a rethink after the first group reading of the script: “Her reading was terrible, in fact not even good enough to be called ‘terrible’. […] That, for me, is the most exciting moment of pre-production; it’s the moment I start to see the film. […] I fired her.” Tarantino knows he is infamous for being fiery, which makes him blush: he told this backstage story because the book aims to explore also the negative aspects of production. He clearly means well with Laurent, who still got the part, because she apologized to the director for her terrible performance and asked for a second chance, granted with joy: “Mélanie is my Shosanna. She was fantastic.”
Tarantino does not negotiate in that phase: “I don’t have a moral compass when I pick actors and actresses: they have to be right for the world I’ve created. I’ve fired people in the past. If you don’t fit, you don’t fit. I owe nothing to anyone. I owe my film the best cast I can find. Period.” And to prove he means business, he had even chosen Isabelle Huppert for the role of Madame Ada Mimieux, the woman who would shelter Shosanna, but Isabelle came to a bad end: “She didn’t show up to the script reading, so whatever. Fired. I mean, I adore Isabelle Huppert, think of Heaven’s Gate and all that, but there were problems with her contract, she dragged her feet for ages. Then she didn’t come to the reading, and in the end we cast Maggie Cheung. […] You can always be fired, especially if when you don’t show up there’s someone else who excites me.”
For the record, the scenes with Cheung in Bastard without glory are no longer in the film, because during editing Tarantino decided they were not really necessary for the narrative.
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